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Experts say social media has a "Funhouse Mirror" effect on our perceptions of the offline world.
Opinion: Social media warped my perception of reality
Over the past week, the algorithms that shape my social media feeds have been serving up tons of content about the Major League Baseball playoffs. This because the algorithms know that I am a fan of the Mets, who have been -- you should know -- on a surreal playoff run for the last two weeks.
A lot of that content is the usual: sportswriter opinion pieces or interviews with players talking about how their teams are “a great group of guys just trying to go out there and win one game at a time,” or team accounts rallying their fan bases with slick highlight videos or “drip reports” on the players’ fashion choices.
But there’s been a lot of uglier stuff too: Padres and Dodgers fan pages threatening each other after some on-field tension between the two teams and their opposing fanbases last week. Or a Mets fan page declaring “war” on Phillies fans who had been filmed chanting “f*ck the Mets” on their way out of their home stadium after a win. Or a clip of a Philly fan’s podcast in which he mocked Mets fans for failing to make Phillies fans feel "fear" at the Mets' ballpark.
As a person who writes often about political polarization for a living, my first thought upon seeing all this stuff was: aha, further evidence that polarization is fueling a deep anger and violence in American life, which is now bleeding into sports, making players more aggressive and fans more violent.
But in fact, there isn’t much evidence for this. Baseball games and crowds are actually safer now than in the past.
I had fallen for social media reflections of the real world that were distorted. It’s what some experts call “The Funhouse Mirror” aspect of the internet.
One of those experts is Claire Robertson, a postgraduate research fellow in political psychology at NYU and the University of Toronto, who studies how the online world warps our understanding of the offline world.
Since Robertson recently published a new paper on precisely this subject, I called her up to ask why it’s so easy for social media to trick us into believing that things are worse than they actually are.
Part of the problem, she says, is that “the things that get the most attention on social media tend to be the most extreme ones.” And that’s because of a nasty feedback loop between two things: first, an incentive structure for social media where profits depend on attention and engagement; and second, our natural inclination as human beings to pay the most attention to the most sensational, provocative, or alarming content.
“We’ve evolved to pay attention to things that are threatening,” says Robertson. “So it makes more sense for us to pay attention to a snake in the grass than to a squirrel.”
And as it happens, a huge amount of those snakes are released into social media by a very small number of people. “A lot of people use social media,” says Robertson, “but far fewer actually post – and the most ideologically extreme people are the most likely to post.”
People with moderate opinions, which is actually most people, tend to fare poorly on social media, says Robertson. One study, of Reddit, showed that 33% of all content was generated by just 3% of accounts, which spew hate. Another revealed that 80% of fake news on Facebook came from just 0.1% of all accounts.
“But the interesting thing,” she says, “is, what’s happening to the 99.9% of people that aren’t sharing fake news? What's happening to the good actors? How does the structure of the internet, quite frankly, screw them over?”
In fact, we screw ourselves over, and we can’t help it. Blame our brains. For the sake of efficiency, our gray matter is wired to take some shortcuts when we seek to form views about groups of people in the world. And social media is where a lot of us go to form those opinions.
When we get there, we are bombarded, endlessly, with the most extreme versions of people and groups – “Socialist Democrats” or “Fascist Republicans” or “Pro-Hamas Arabs” or “Genocidal Jews” or “immigrant criminals” or “racist cops.” As a result, we start to see all members of these groups as hopelessly extreme, bad, and threatening in the real world too.
Small wonder that Democrats’ and Republicans’ opinions of each other in the abstract have, over the past two decades, gotten so much worse. We don’t see each other as ideological opponents with different views but, increasingly, as existential threats to each other and our society.
Of course, it only makes matters worse when people in the actual real world are committed to spreading known lies – say, that elections are stolen or that legal immigrants who are going hungry are actually illegal immigrants who are eating cats.
But what’s the fix for all of this? Regulators in many countries are turning to tighter rules on content moderation. But Robertson says that’s not effective. For one thing, it raises “knotty” philosophical questions about what should be moderated and by whom. But beyond that, it’s not practical.
“It's a hydra,” she says. “If you moderate content on Twitter, people who want to see extreme content are going to go to FourChan. If you moderate the content on FourChan, they're going to go somewhere else.”
Rather than trying to kill the supply of toxic crap on social media directly, Robertson wants to reduce the demand for it, by getting the rest of us to think more critically about what we see online. Part of that means stopping to compare what we see online with what we know about the actual human beings in our lives – family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, classmates.
Do all “Republicans” really believe the loony theory that Hurricane Milton is a man-made weather event? Or is that just the opinion of one particularly fringe Republican? Do all people calling for an end to the suffering in Gaza really “support Hamas,” or is that the view of a small fringe with outsized exposure on social media?
“When you see something that’s really extreme and you start to think everybody must think that, really think: ‘Does my mom believe that? Do my friends believe that? Do my classmates believe that?’ It will help you realize that what you are seeing online is not actually a true reflection of reality.”
Al Gore: "Artificial insanity" threatens democracy
It is not a partisan statement to acknowledge that the future of American democracy is very much an open question. In 2020, we witnessed the first non-peaceful transition of power from one US presidential administration to another for the first time in modern history. And if past is prelude, 2024 could be a good deal worse. So what accounts for the imperiled state of democracy? Misinformation, coupled with technology, is a big part, says former vice president and Nobel laureate Al Gore in an upcoming episode of GZERO World.
Ian Bremmer caught up with Gore on the sidelines of the 2024 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland to talk about the upcoming US election and, as you might expect, the existential threats posed by climate change. In this clip, Gore talks about today's witches' brew of new technologies, social media, and a lack of shared trust amongst Americans.
"These algorithms that suck people down proverbial rabbit holes, they're more like the pitcher plants with slippery sides and at the bottom of the rabbit hole, that's where the echo chamber is. And people who dwell long enough in the echo chamber become vulnerable to a new kind of AI. Not artificial intelligence, but artificial insanity."
Catch Al Gore's full conversation with Ian Bremmer in next week's episode of GZERO World at gzeromedia.com/gzeroworld or on US public television. Check local listings.
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Businessman Vivek Ramaswamy speaks during the Republican presidential primary debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum.
The Algorithm Candidate: Vivek Ramaswamy
Let’s talk about Vivek Ramaswamy, who I call The Algorithm Candidate. Why does a guy polling at 5% with little-to-no shot of winning the Republican race matter so much?
For one, winning is beside the point to Ramaswamy. He is auditioning for either a Trump vice presidency or for the next campaign, where he hopes to hot-wire the MAGA right for his quest for power. How will he do this?
By becoming a creature of the algorithm. Ramaswamy, even more than Trump, is a candidate self-created to maximize and amplify algorithmically generated outrage, conspiracy, and chaos. He has created a self-perpetuating feedback loop, seeking out the populist paranoias promoted by algorithms, and repeating them publicly, which supercharges the algorithms and re-amplifies them again online. Round and round it goes.
It is a dynamic that Max Fisher exposed in his superb book “The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World.” “It was as if your community had suddenly decided that it valued provocation and outrage above all else, rewarding it with waves of attention that were, in reality, algorithmically generated,” writes Fisher. “And because the algorithm down-sorted posts it judged as unengaging, the inverse was true, too. It felt as if your peers suddenly scorned nuance and emotional moderation with the implicit rejection of ignoring you. Users seemed to absorb those cues, growing meaner and angrier, intent on humiliating out-group members, punishing social transgressors, and validating one another’s worldviews.”
This is a near-perfect description of the Ramaswamy campaign and why in debates he doesn’t answer questions but creates algorithm-friendly memes to supercharge outrage that supports his campaign. He is the Chaos Machine candidate incarnate.
The 38-year-old, Harvard-educated lawyer and multi-millionaire entrepreneur speaks with the laminar flow velocity of a tap on full blast. He began his public life as an anti-woke crusader but has now expanded into a full-blown conspiracy-touting flamethrower. He has grown with the algorithm.
If you watched him last night on his CNN town hall – or any of the debates or his rallies – Ramaswamy confidently now shills extreme beliefs, conveniently deleting facts and reality to package them into pretty little meme boxes that he calls “truths” that he promptly releases online to fundraise for his fury-driven campaign.
The danger is that he is also amplifying disinformation and conspiracy theories that benefit the malign intentions of countries like Russia and China. At times, it looks like his platform was written specifically by Moscow and Beijing.
Hey Putin, want the US out of Ukraine so you can take over the country? Ramaswamy is your man. He called the Jewish Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a Nazi, and he argues that the US should stop support for Ukraine and cede the country to Russia, as long as Moscow stops its relationship with … China.
His idea is that Russia will somehow become a US ally in exchange for Ukraine and no more sanctions, and that will make China scared to invade Taiwan because now the US won’t have to fight two superpower enemies. Do you follow? Ok. Putin is all in on this one.
And for you President Xi?
Ramaswamy is also ready to cede Taiwan to China, but … only after the US no longer needs Taiwan to provide it with superconductors, which he claims will happen by 2028. So, the US would arm Taiwan for four years, and then, after semiconductor independence, China, it is all yours.
Destabilize US intuitions and democracy? Got you covered with a bouquet of conspiracy theories:
- “January 6th now does look like it was an inside job?" he said at the last debate, with very little evidence.
- 9/11 was likely orchestrated by the US government, he told The Atlantic.
- The 2022 election was “rigged by Big Tech” is a fan favorite.
Now he’s even promoting the far-right racist “Great Replacement Theory,” which alleges that there is a plan to wipe out the white race. “The ‘Great Replacement Theory’ is not some grand right-wing conspiracy theory,” he yelled at the last debate. “But a basic statement of the Democratic Party's platform.”
That one had far-right racist antisemites like Nick Fuentes, who dined with Donald Trump and who recently said on his Rumble show that Christians in America should wipe out and kill all Jews, delighted.
Ramaswamy calls climate change a hoax. He wants to fire 1 million federal workers, and close the Department of Education and the FBI. And on it goes.
In other words, the more chaos, the more the algorithms love him, the more popular he gets, and the more damage is done.
In 2016, I wrote a piece about Justin Trudeau calling him the first “viral Prime Minister, creating political ‘moments’ specifically so they become shareable.”
But soon everyone was doing that. Times have changed. In 2015, the candidate could control the algorithms to create viral moments. In 2023, the algorithms control the candidate to create viral moments.
With the acceleration capabilities of AI, this will get worse.
At the height of the Cold War, Frank Sinatra starred in a film called "The Manchurian Candidate," which was remade with Denzel Washington in 2004. It was about a soldier brainwashed by communist Korean forces to destabilize and help overthrow the US government. It was a paranoid fantasy that captured the zeitgeist of a paranoid era.
Now, things are different. No need to brainwash one soldier when you can brainwash millions online and then get a leader to market it at no cost? Who needs The Manchurian Candidate when The Algorithm Candidate gets the chaos job done much faster? Ramaswamy is just the beginning.
Beware AI's negative impact on our world, warns former Google CEO Eric Schmidt
Does Big Tech really understand AI? Ian Bremmer talks to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt & co-author of “The Age of AI: And Our Human Future,” who believes we need to control AI before it controls us.
What's troubling about AI, he says, is that it’s like nothing we’ve seen before, it's still very new. Instead of being precise, AI learns by doing– exactly like humans.
The coronavirus pandemic drove people’s lives even more online– we are now more connected than ever before. But we don't always know who runs our digital world.
The problem is that instead of governments, tech companies are writing the rules through computer algorithms powered by artificial intelligence.
The US and China competition in AI is intensifying. China is already doing pretty scary stuff with it, like surveillance of Uyghurs in Xinjiang (and also some fun stuff, like publicly shaming jaywalkers). Schmidt explains that it's because the Chinese ensures their internet reflects the priorities of the Communist Party --- he’s not a big fan of those values shaping the AI on apps his children use. Yet, he blames algorithms, not China, for the polarization on social media. Schmidt is all for free speech, but not for robots.
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Nicholas Thompson on the outsized influence of Big Tech
Ian Bremmer speaks with Nicholas Thompson, CEO of the Atlantic and former WIRED editor-in-chief, about how to police the digital world. Today's digital space, where we live so much of our daily lives, has increasingly become an area that national governments are unable to control. It may be time to start thinking of these corporations as nation-states in their own rights.
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Have governments lost control of the digital world?
Sort of, but governments haven't lost all control yet. On the one hand, The Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson says that governments can still push tech companies for transparency in their algorithms, while Microsoft has partnered with the US government to together fight hackers "so the company is seen as a champion for freedom and democracy." On the other, over time Thompson expects tech firms in the US and China to gradually become more powerful as the state becomes less powerful toward them. Watch his interview with Ian Bremmer on the latest episode of GZERO World.
Watch this episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer: Big Tech: Global sovereignty, unintended consequences
Big Tech: Global sovereignty, unintended consequences
Can Big Government still rein in Big Tech or has it already lost control? Never before have just a few companies exerted such an outsized influence on humanity. Today's digital space, where we live so much of our daily lives, has increasingly become an area that national governments are unable to control. It may be time to start thinking of these corporations as nation-states in their own rights. On GZERO World, Ian Bremmer speaks with Nicholas Thompson, CEO of the Atlantic and former WIRED editor-in-chief, about how to police the digital world.
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Podcast: Brave new big tech world: Nicholas Thompson's perspective
Listen: Can Big Government still rein in Big Tech or has it already lost control? Never before have just a few companies exerted such an outsized influence on humanity. Today's digital space, where we live so much of our daily lives, has increasingly become an area that national governments are unable to control. It may be time to start thinking of these corporations as nation-states in their own rights. Ian Bremmer speaks with Nicholas Thompson, CEO of the Atlantic and former WIRED editor-in-chief, about how to police the digital world.